Critical Reflection

Hello everybody, I am Mohan s/o Ramamoorthy and I am writing this final reflection to talk about some of the skills and knowledge gained throughout the MEC1281 course. 

In the first week, I wrote a formal letter, discussing my strengths, weaknesses as well as some goals that I wanted to achieve through this module. The main flaw that I described was my presentation skills. I have always been a terrible presenter and during the mock presentation, I showed why presenting was my weakness. However, my groupmates and fellow classmates gave me feedback and advice on how to improve. From the advice I got from my classmates, as well as through the lessons that I learned throughout the course of the module, I managed to improve my presentation skills a lot. It's still not perfect, however, I personally saw improvements in myself. There is still room for improvements nonetheless. Firstly, I need to look at the screen/slides less when I present and I need to try to not memorize the script as much as I did before. I also need to vary the tone of my voice as I tend to seem monotonous. I learned to gain some confidence in presenting through better preparation and practice. There will be many more presentations in the future for me and by following what I learned during this module, I know that I can definitely overcome this weakness of mine.

Working on the project with my teammates gave me a better understanding of how communication is a very important aspect of teamwork. My teammates helped me a lot when we were preparing for the presentation. They gave me constructive feedback to help me improve on my presentation skills as well as gave me tips and tricks to make it easier for me. I learned a lot about how much feedback from peers and my professor helps improve a team's overall performance. 

I don't write or read a lot and I have had lots of grammar and vocabulary issues before the start of this module and I definitely made improvements. This is why in terms of writing, I am actually quite pleased with myself as I received generally positive remarks and feedback from my peers and professor. However, nothing is perfect and there is always room for improvement. There will be tons of reports to write for the remainder of this engineering degree, as well as when I start working in the industry. The report writing skills I learned here is something that I am glad I learned as it will be used frequently. Working as a team on the report was also very helpful as everyone has different writing styles and I got the opportunity to learn from my groupmates. Similar to the presentation, getting feedback from the professor and peers helped improve our writing and delivery. 

I hope to keep improving on my presentation and writing skills as they will be much needed when I start working in the industry. I am quite pleased with the improvements that I made throughout the journey of this module and am thankful to all my classmates and teammates for giving me feedback and helping me improve. I hope to work with the rest of the class in other modules within the next 2 years. I would also like to thank Prof Brad as he was very helpful and constructive in his feedback both for my presenting and writing. His lessons were very engaging and fun which made learning a lot easier. 

Regards,
Mohan
MEC1281 T6